Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, goodbye would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet.So long,...
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver scr...
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.Here, she said, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps...
She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life dema...
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its dem...
People who die bad don't stay in the ground.
Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it b...
O Lord, Sula, she cried, girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she...
I sure did live in this world.''Really? What have you got to show for it?''Show? To who? I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.''Lonely, ain't it?''Yes. But my lonely is min...
I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.
I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
He said, 'Always. Always.
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.
Passion is never enough neither is skill.
I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was sitting in first-period...